Who Do You Trust on the Web?

It seems pornographers have the same problems as any other businesses once they gain a bad reputation. Pretty much everyone is wary of porn websites because of the bad practices of some. The U.S. industry generally, anxious to hold on to the 40 million Americans who view pages with adult content regularly, have made great efforts to ensure their sites are free from scams and malware. So successful have they been that a Web Of Trust blog  tells us that while 'adult entertainment websites' account for 12% of the total number of web pages (1 in 6) a study has found that there are 99 infected mainstream web pages for every one infected adult web page, making the safety ratio 99:1. It seems those of us who avoid adult websites and think we're safe shouldn't be so complacent.
Web Of Trust or WOT is a great way to use the wisdom of crowds as a guide to websites. You can download it as an app for various browsers and better still join WOT and register your own scores and comments on the websites you visit.

Hotel's Reputation Goes Down the Toilet

There are always two paths you can take- the one that wins customers and the one that loses them.

After queuing for 20 minutes to check in at The St Johns Hotel (part of the Principal Hayley group) in Solihull because there was only one receptionist, my wife and I were finally issued with our key cards. When we got to the room, I unlocked the door and my wife went in first to be greeted by a man sitting on the toilet! She screamed, he looked shocked and we beat a hasty retreat. How could we have been given a room that was already occupied? The receptionist was very apologetic but we never got a satisfactory explanation.

I think if I’d been the receptionist I would have told the manager what had happened so s/he didn’t find out first from the guest. As the manager, I would have personally apologised to all concerned and given some compensation for what was a hugely embarrassing experience. That would have turned a memorable story into one that reflected well on the hotel. As a footnote, we were given our own room eventually so we didn’t have to share- and Solihull is very nice.

The PR In Front Is Not Toyota

It's one of the basic rules of PR that if you’ve got a problem you admit everything, apologise and get on with fixing it preferably with generous compensation. Excuses, delays or, perish the thought, cover ups are always a mistake. Hard to believe then that a company as clever and experienced as Toyota could make such a mess of dealing with the technical problems with their cars.

At Your Life Your Style we needed to make some apologies just before Christmas. A couple of our deliveries went astray in the great freeze. As soon as customers informed us of the problem, we apologised and sent replacements along with a refund of the carriage cost and a small gift.

I like the way shops like Waitrose and M&S give you a refund and a replacement if you find something wrong with their food. Not so good was the service at Boots in Romsey last Sunday when I was waiting at the medicines counter. A pharmacist was busy nearby sorting prescriptions which I assumed he couldn’t leave unattended. An assistant at the next counter was involved in a long transaction. When she’d finished she came over only to say she wasn’t authorised to sell medicines. She went to get another assistant.

When I complained that I’d been waiting over five minutes, the new assistant said ‘You could have shouted or told the pharmacist.’ An astonishing response that assumed I knew the first assistant couldn’t serve me, that the pharmacist wouldn’t call someone without needing to be nudged and that I would want to be shouting ‘Shop!’ ‘Sorry’ was the one thing she wasn’t.

The Price Is Right

I love, actually I need to start the working day with a coffee. To be precise, a latte from Costa. And every day I can’t believe I’m paying £2 for a takeaway coffee. How did the coffee houses persuade us to pay such an outrageous price which appears to bear no relation to cost?

To be fair, when we price products for our gift shop Your Life Your Style, it’s not as simple as taking the cost and applying a standard percentage mark up. There are a number of factors we take into account. As I always tell businesses who consult me, you first must consider the market and set a price appropriate to it.

As retailers, we have little say over the product’s position in the market, so we move straight on to how many we expect to sell and how much customers are willing to pay. At Your Life Your Style, we rarely expect to sell products on a mass scale because we offer special gifts and accessories.

However, if we can sell a reasonable number, we can afford a lower margin and make the profit we need through scale. Going back to my old theatre marketing days, I think of the example of Christmas pantomime where the type of audience and the numbers who attend allow for lower prices than for, say, a musical.

On the other hand, if the market is more niche, it is necessary to charge more. Opera comes to mind as a case where, at least when I was trying to sell it, no matter how cheap you made the tickets, there were only so many people interested in buying. At Your Life Your Style, we may go for a higher than average profit margin if we know a product is unique and may take some time to shift.

Of course, how people themselves value the product will have a big influence. And this is where it gets more complicated. Marketing, word-of-mouth and the intrinsic qualities of the product will potentially affect a consumer’s attitude to a product. They may have an emotional attachment to it or make a rational decision about its quality or simply want to show off that they have the taste or money to purchase it. Whatever the reason, if a customer believes the product to be exceptional or life enhancing, they will pay a premium for it.

This is why we don’t automatically charge the lowest price we can afford based on cost. A cheap price means to many people an inferior product because that is what they’ve learned from experience. No doubt Chanel could charge less but their customers want to buy an expensive perfume. In fact, perfume manufacturers and other fashion brands like Levi have fought hard to stop their products being discounted and thereby ‘cheapened’.

Back to coffee (and I am beginning to feel like another latte), Starbucks managed to persuade us that we were getting something special. Special beans, specially roasted, freshly ground, customised to your taste and in a social club atmosphere. Hence the special price. Then everybody started imitating it but the strange thing is, the more popular premium coffee became, the more the price should have come down. Yet it didn’t.

Initially Costa and the rest wanted to show they were the same quality as Starbucks, so they matched the prices. Even so, in all the years since, no-one has broken ranks and reduced prices. I read that at a blind tasting people preferred McDonalds coffee to Starbucks but it will take some persuading people that you don’t always get what you pay for.

Knowing the price people will pay forces Your Life Your Style reluctantly to turn down some excellent products where the cost is too high, taking into account all our overheads. For example, we have found that some (not all) products hand crafted in Britain are so expensive to produce that the retail price looks hugely expensive when compared with either something handcrafted in the third world or something mass produced. Every product must earn the time and space it takes up.

There is always an element of trial and error in pricing. We know there is a tipping point at which a product sells, so it’s easier to start with a higher price first and, if the product doesn’t sell, lower it. This then gives us the opportunity to employ the other great pricing tool- the bargain. Some more cynical businesses deliberately charge a high price to establish that something has a value, not expecting the product to sell, then cut the price. This way, people don’t see it as ‘cheap’ but rather a ‘bargain’.

We prefer to price fairly from the start, because we know that customers have no respect for cynical businesses. Their spend with a gift-cum-lifestyle shop like ours is entirely discretionary so we need their respect. To me, getting the price right is a constantly challenging element of running a business. There is no easy formula but if you get it wrong, all your other good work goes out the window.

How New Labour Lost Its Market

When the government party comes fifth in an election behind the Greens and the BNP, you know they’ve got problems. If they were a business, they’d be heading for bankruptcy.

Heres my admittedly simple-minded take on the history of British politics in the last hundred years. Things started so well for Labour at the beginning of the 20th century. They spotted a new market of newly enfranchised working class voters, added a targeting of liberal intellectuals who’d previously supported the Liberals, and the consequence was, the Labour Party formed its first government. Their second and greatest success came after the second world war, when they had a massive majority of voters hungry for change. They delivered on their promises with the National Health Service and much more welfare state and government control of industry and the economy.

This didn’t last because of the poor state of the economy in war-ravaged Britain but they were now an electable party and, better still, the Conservatives adapted their product to the new climate and embraced the welfare state. After further periods in government in the sixties and seventies, the Labour product became discredited as the welfare state became more expensive to manage and the government-control of industries was discredited by strikes instigated by powerful left-wing Unions. A good time then for the Conservatives to come up with a new improved product that promised to tame the unions and use market forces to sort out industry and the economy. The delivery of low income taxes and prosperity was crucial.

Poor handling of the economy led to the downfall of the Conservatives after a long period of success. However, after three defeats, the Labour leadership’s analysis was (rightly) that they had allowed themselves to become controlled by the hard left and their outdated policies. They could only get themselves elected if they appealed to the middle ground. So, just as a generation earlier the Conservatives had embraced the welfare state, now Labour now took on the Conservatives’ clothes- yes to market forces, no to union power, yes to low taxes, no to government intervention.

This would have been a good idea if they had retained a bedrock of solid left-of-centre policies. However New Labour abandoned their original market. They have let poor working class get poorer and have outraged liberal intellectuals because of the Iraq war, 42 day detentions and other reasons too numerous to list. If the new market was more reliable this wouldn’t necessarily matter but the ‘middle ground’ is fickle, caring only about how prosperous they feel. While the economy was ‘safe in their hands’, Labour was safe. Now, the party may be beginning to realise that New Labour was built on sand and it no longer has any rock on which to rely or rebuild.

It’s a shame really because things could have been so different. The collapse of the world economy has exposed the failures of a purely market economy. It should have been the opportunity for Labour to show that their traditional Keynesian approach to economics, where the state intervenes to control and stimulate the market, is a better model. No chance of that with the Conservatives.

Every lasting business knows that following the market is a short term solution with temporary results. Long term success relies on an authentic product with which at a profitable section of the market can identify. Governments will always come and go depending on how they are perceived to be protecting us, primarily by managing the economy well but also against ill health, terrorism and so on. But parties, like businesses, can only continue if they have core values that voters/customers connect with. The problem is, no-one knows what either of the main parties’ values are anymore.

Humane Resources

Human Resources have a deservedly bad image. In my experience the term exactly sums up the attitude of too many people doing that particular job. They don’t regard employees as people, simply ‘resources’ that happen to be ‘human’ as opposed to technical or whatever. The main point of their jobs seems to be to find clever ways to exploit employees or get rid of them.

What a joy, then, to hear about the human resources people at Zappos- the hugely successful American catalogue shoe retailer. They want the best, most committed people to work in their phone sales department. So, they train them for four weeks on full salary and, at the end of that period, they offer them a $1000 to leave! The theory being that if the employee would rather have a few dollars than work for them, they’re not the kind of committed people they want.

This is brilliant because one of the biggest problems most of us have as employers is the time it takes to find out that someone isn’t right for the company. This way you have a good chance of weeding them out early.

Then when these people work for Zappos, they’re given free rein to do whatever it takes to make a customer happy. There are no scripts, standard responses, jobsworth attitudes or time targets. Every aspect of the way they treat their employees is an anathema to most Human Resources people and their patrons- Accountants.

For more about the radical customer-first approach of Zappos, read this article by Bill Taylor.

Is Your Brochure a Page-Turner or a Turn-Off?

What makes the perfect season brochure? A winning formula involves more than making it look pretty. If the brochure you’re involved with isn’t using the following techniques and quite a few others, then you’re losing sales.

Let’s begin at the end. If the brochure has been displayed back to front or thrown casually on a table, its back cover may be the first sight the customer has of a brochure, so a good one will have the venue’s name clearly displayed for people who know your business and will actually pick up a brochure for it.

When you put something on the back cover, it’s like shining a Super Trouper on it. Along with the inside covers and the centre spread, it’s one of the ‘hot spots’ that get noticed. A well planned brochure won’t waste these positions with boring information like How To Find Us or Terms & Conditions, because these are the best pages to sell the most valuable products.

Flipping the brochure over, the front cover will be shouting ‘PICK ME UP!’ It will use more tricks than Paris Hilton to grab attention, apart from forgetting to put knickers on. Look at magazine covers- you’ll nearly always see one big image (probably an attractive face (probably an attractive famous face)). An unusual picture can also make an impression. What they won’t have is a lot of tiny images, because trying to please everybody pleases nobody.

The brochure cover will use strong colours, especially red since that’s a colour more likely to appeal to women who form the majority of shoppers.

Notice how the most important reasons for picking it up are at the top. A designer sees the whole cover on a screen but we know that our piece of print may be stuck behind something on a tiered rack, so we need the venue name and the key products to be featured on the visible area.

Next time, we'll look at the inside pages.

No News Is Bad PR

It’s great to get publicity for a stunt- even better when you don’t actually do the stunt. Well, unless you’re found out.

The Southampton Daily Echo reported that the city’s major shopping centre West Quay would be turning its lights off for Earth Hour. This was excellent publicity for a centre that’s closed on a Saturday night. Even better, the Echo ranked it alongside Sydney Harbour Bridge as a world landmark!

All well and good, except unfortunately their lights didn’t actually go off. Which turned a good story into bad publicity. The lesson is, when you try to get publicity on the back of an external event, make sure you’ve told the people on the ground.

I want to tell you a story

Seth Godin's latest blog is about how whatever you do in the course of your work tells your customers a story about your business. It reminded me that I didn't post my recent article from Encore magazine about the story your marketing tells. Here it is-

“I want to tell you a story.” Like many comedians, Max Bygraves understood from the start of his career the power of the story to attract and keep an audience’s attention. I discovered recently, having been involved in marketing a new shop, that the best window dressers too aim to tell a ‘story’ in their displays.

This doesn’t mean the literal kind of narrative you might see in Selfridges windows at Christmas. Put simply, it’s that the colours, the props and the products themselves should work together to say something. This ‘something’ might be suggesting certain garments and accessories that will go well together on a night out or it might be ‘Don’t forget to buy a present for Mother’s Day’.

When marketing entertainment, we need to tell a story if we want to sell tickets. The flier or brochure cover says instantly in the colours, the style and the words what the show or venue is about. Bright colours will put across fun and excitement- check out Really Useful Group’s Joseph poster. Black and white for a drama or pop star will suggest something moody and sophisticated. Think of the marvellous image David Pugh produced for Rebecca or the consistent effectiveness of Chicago’s marketing even after ten years.

An image can make the story or end it. As the old Chinese proverb says, ‘one picture is worth a thousand words’. (Actually the saying was coined in the 1920s by Fred Barnard, an American PR man, who said it was an ancient proverb to give it more cachet. Marketing people, eh?)

We work in show business so we know how much appearance helps. Think of when TV producer Jack Good came across this weedy bloke with a very good record and put him in sexy leathers- Gene Vincent never looked back. At the other end of the scale, Brian Epstein took The Beatles out of their jeans and leather jackets and put them in suits and ties to say to people- we may be revolutionary but we’re loveable and family-friendly too.


The picture or pictures must tell the story of the show- I’m involved in publicising a show called Tango! Tango! at the moment and the main photo is a sensuous shot of an entwined couple, not on the dance floor, but isolated in a cavernous space with one shaft of light picking them out. It says everything about the all consuming passion of the dance.

How pictures are arranged makes a big difference. This is sometimes known as design— a word that is clearly unknown to many promoters and venues! Throwing a lot of images into the advertisement or brochure page is a bit like saying ‘People like country music, rock’n’roll and hiphop so if I put them on the same bill I’ll get three times the audience.’ The images must work together to tell the story and should literally move the eye around the page in a journey that will keep the attention and reveal the story of the show or venue. In this case, the story is about the content of the show and must create a desire to see it and it’s also the information about where and when it can be seen.

The most obvious way of telling a story is through words- whether in a press release (we even talk of newspaper ‘stories’), in brochure copy, in a mailing or even in an advertising slogan. ‘Lie, Cheat, Steal… all in a day’s work’ says the poster for Glengarry Glen Ross at the Apollo.

‘Feel The Magic’ was a phrase I used. It didn’t merit serious analysis for meaning but the two words (I mean the first and third!) instantly conveyed the appeal of going to the theatre. Whether it’s two or two hundred words, every one should say something about the product and lead the reader on a journey. Like Max’s stories, you must grab the attention, keep them interested and lead to a punch-line- in our case, get them to buy a ticket.

Alarming Nipple- How Not To React To Bad Publicity

Jeanne Bliss on the website Marketing Profs Daily Fix brings our attention to a great example of how not to react to bad publicity. In Lubbock Texas recently, a woman’s nipple ring was detected by the security system. She was forced to go through a humiliating procedure during which she had to remove the ring in front of officers. Naturally this made the Transportation Security Administration look very bad.

The situation could have been saved at this point. They could have accepted they did wrong, but no, “It appears that the Transportation Security Officers involved properly followed procedures.” They could have explained what they had done to ensure this sort of thing never happens. Instead they offered a woolly “we are changing the procedures”.

Most important of all, they could have said ‘sorry’. Instead, when you wade through all the flummery, here’s their ‘apology’: “TSA acknowledges that our procedures caused difficulty for the passenger involved and regrets the situation in which she found herself.” In other words, sorry but you’ve only yourself to blame.

A commentator invents a new motto for the TSA, “You fly… we pry.”

Innocent Until Proven Guilty?

The son of a family friend was recently accused of a crime. There was no proof, simply one person’s word. The police arrested him in the middle of the night, seized his clothing then released him on bail. Despite him being a minor and despite guidelines that state such people should be dealt with quickly, it took five months before they finally decided they had no evidence on which to charge him. (I could add that the ‘witness’ turned out to be totally unreliable.) Then, when he went to collect his clothes, they handed them over in large brown bags marked ‘Police Evidence’ and ‘Prisoner Property’ to carry through the streets. All in all, it was a highly traumatic experience for a young person who has always been law abiding.

The police should ask themselves whether treating an innocent young person like a criminal, especially after there is no doubt of his innocence, is likely to encourage him to regard the police as worthy of support in the future. A commercial company offering this kind of customer service would be damaging its brand and risk going out of business.

Joss Stone Makes The Flake Ad

I love the new Cadbury's Flake TV ad featuring Joss Stone. It perfectly recreates the style of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about making a record. As the recording progresses, there's a slight problem necessitating a pause. During the break, Ms Stone idly picks up a Flake and casually sings, as any of us might, the well-known jingle in her inimitable voice. Instead of putting the bar straight into her mouth as you would expect from the previous ads, thus rather obviously suggesting fellatio, she breaks off a small piece and eats it. The coup de grace is when she looks down and casually flicks off some crumbs from her front, which anyone who's eaten a Flake can relate to.
Perfect in every way- beautifully structured; referring to the universally known Flake ads tradition while at the same time undermining it for a modern audience; and the self deprecating humour at the end that makes a real connection. See it and lots more TV ads at Guardian Media's Creative Lounge

What's your real voice?

I was watching a documentary on Al Bowlly, a great crooner from the 1930s, who briefly rivalled Bing Crosby in popularity. I think it was Carrie Grant who commented that at a certain stage he found his own voice- that unique personal quality, she said, that makes a singer seem 'real' to his or her audience. The same is true of writers, painters and any other kind artist. It struck me that this is very like finding the Unique Selling Proposition for your business product. Of course, in the case of business, it's easily squandered if you disrespect it by, for example, using the name to sell other inferior or barely related products.

Sex Sells Theatre Tickets

An article in the Daily Telegraph explains in fascinating detail how David Pugh and his partner Daffyd Rogers financed Equus and their many other theatrical successes and occasional failures. However it says little about the part David’s marketing skill has played in his achievements. I have met no other producer who combines theatrical knowledge with marketing flair in quite the way David does.


David’s decision to change the cast of Art every twelve weeks was a clever way of keeping the show in the news, as was the special celebrity guest each night in The Play What I Wrote. When he brought Rebecca starring Nigel Havers to my then theatre, he marketed it with a brilliant black and white photo (by Lord Lichfield) of Havers looking wistful on a beach. David gave me a framed version of the poster when we broke the British box office record for a play. It’s the only theatre poster I have in my office.



The image used for Equus was just as striking, featuring a bare chested Daniel Radcliffe whose lower body morphed into a horse’s head. The announcement of the West End run was accompanied by studio photos of a nearly naked Daniel. They were entirely in keeping with the sexual themes in the play but the image of a sexy Harry Potter gained coverage in virtually every national paper.

When is June?

I always look forward to receiving the Southampton Harbour Lights Picture House brochure each month. When the June issue arrived, I was excited to see they are screening Top Hat on 10 June, so I phoned the box office to book tickets, only to be told it doesn’t go on sale until 5 June. Golden rule: don’t advertise something you can’t sell.

My wife found the opposite problem. She bought the June issue of Good Housekeeping on 27th May only to find that a readers’ offer from M&S ran out on 23rd May. She phoned GH to complain but the person she spoke to couldn’t care less, arguing that the issue had appeared in early May.

Two good examples of how to piss off your customers.

It's not just a catchphrase...

An article in The Guardian last week heralded the death of catchphrases in the age of advertisements that sell stories, feelings and images. I think there'll always be room for a memorable phrase that encapsulates a brand. 'It's not just food, it's M&S food', 'I bet he didn't go to Specsavers' are just two recent successes that show the catchphrase is alive and well.

If you're going to do it, do it properly

Last Monday saw the launch of Celebratio, an event management and ticketing system from SecureTicket for which The Lewis Experience has been providing PR and marketing support. What I like about the people at SecureTicket (apart from the fact that they're very nice) is that they realise the danger of the false economy.

So they chose the Cafe Royal for the launch- a top class, sophisticated venue right in the heart of London, not some anonymous hotel on the fringes. They got a well known celebrity (Maggie Philbin, the BBC's Face Of Technology, pictured with Rashid Qajar, chief executive of SecureTicket) to host it instead of relying on their excellent but unknown selves. They served champagne not cheap sparkling wine. They commissioned a short comedy film and hired a live band, rather than simply offering a power point presentation.

The result was a well-attended evening and potential clients going away with an image of a company that doesn't just promise great things but actually delivers.

If you want to know more about Celebratio, which by the way is Latin for 'audience', visit the website secureticket.biz.

No Checking Spells Disaster

I know there are many worse things in the world but it really irritates me when I see spelling and grammatical errors.

I was in a petrol station last week where a sign said that they were going to be closing for ‘maintenence’. The same day I found a shop that was looking for someone who could work ‘flexable’ hours. These were produced on a PC so what’s the excuse for not doing a spell check? Worse still, I saw an ad for one of BT’s business services on a website which promised they would ‘moniter’ activities.

There is a renowned Press Officer at a Midlands concert venue who has made an art form out of sloppiness. He/she recently referred to Foden's Richardson Band as Foden Richardsons Brass Band and The Foden’s Richardson Brass Band, both in the same press release, but never by the correct name. It’s a Council-owned venue so I assume their Equal Opportunities Policy extends to not discriminating against people who can’t copy the words in front of them.

This may all seem a little anally retentive in our 'let everyone do their own thing' world but there is a serious point. A lot of us do care about spelling and grammar, therefore when a business gets it wrong, it undermines our confidence that the company will get other more important things right.